Went to bed an Ottomanist, woke up an Ataturkist

Observation doing the rounds: The AKP Chief has panicked and, in a leap of faith, is banking all on “Ataturkism”.
Opinion doing the rounds: He is calculating on making good the blatant electoral shortfall on the road to the executive presidency by getting votes from the body of voters described as “Ataturkist”.
Your scribe’s conclusion: Not a hope.
 
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It is not hard to understand the AKP Chief’s panic. He made a diagnosis of “metal fatigue”, devoid of meaning in a political context, and tried and is trying to wash his hands by pinning the blame on the big city mayors for the wear and tear of fifteen years in power and the failure to do as well as he had hoped in the referendum.
Never mind public opinion at large, he has not even managed to convince his own voters. AKP voters inquired as to the faults, errors and deficiencies of the resigning mayors that led to them being forced to resign and were unable to find an answer that convinced them.
The AKP Chief has seen and sees that he will not garner the vote he needs for his own obsessive dreams, that is to enable him to assume the post of “executive president” with him gathering the state’s entire legislative, administrative and judicial powers in his own hands. Moreover, he sees every passing day bringing new losses.
The undisputable fiasco in foreign policy and, domestically, the incompetence that becomes ever more marked in the education system, the ignorance and incapability of creating solutions, the lack of vision that cannot remedy the unemployment and high living costs in the economy – the wind that once swelled the AKP’s sails has started to blow backwards, even under conditions in which the rule of law does not even apply on paper. This is a truth of which even the ordinary voter is now aware.
 
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We see before us an AKP Chief who “went to bed an Ottomanist, woke up an Ataturkist.”
The erroneous calculations in foreign policy have been and are the cause of consternation in Baghdad, Damascus, Berlin, Brussels and Washington.
As to the erroneous calculations domestically, these will cause consternation at the ballot box in which he was placing so much faith.
To hope that he will be able to get the vote of the body of voters who call themselves Ataturkist just because he took the few thousand AKP members he could muster on 10 November to Atatürk’s mausoleum and kept on repeating the name of Atatürk, which he had carefully refrained from enunciating for years, on screens, before the heads of villages and quarters and everywhere he held a microphone is tantamount to branding those voters as idiots.
Some of them may think one way and some of them may think another, but idiots they most certainly are not.
So, the Chief who is expecting votes from those circles has not a hope.
Let him pray that he just fails on this score. If you ask me, he is also bound to lose votes from his own body of voters.
Do not forget that the religious orders that have nurtured and fed political Islam since the proclamation of the Republic until today, most notably the Nakshibendis, have portrayed and depicted Ataturkism to the milieus over which they have managed to hold sway as an ideology that constrains religion’s power, excludes religion from the state with its principle of secularism and embraces values that are incompatible with Islam through its lifestyle.
N. Erbakan’s National Order Party that was officially founded in the first month of 1970 and the politically Islamic parties that followed in its wake forever nurtured and fed the body of electorate it managed to attract into its ranks with anti-Ataturkist sentiment. Such circles are not likely to unquestioningly obey the Chief, who has now all of a sudden struck an Ataturkist pose, and his party’s new ideological preference.
The media that has made a profession of sucking up to the Chief may change overnight. But, circles whose consciousnesses have been stunted by being fed a perverse ideology for many years are even now starting to ask, “What the heck’s going on?”
So, it would appear the Chief is going to bet the house and lose.